What do you do when you have nothing left to lose? You say goodbye to everything and everyone you'd ever known, pack up your worldly belongings (and an old half-blind dog), cast off your lines and set sail in your tiny sailboat to anywhere else.

Two years ago, Matt lost his wife to an asleep-at-the-wheel truck driver for the corrupt Clawson Chicken Corporation, and most of his savings to a court battle with the aforementioned fowl magnate. Trusting that the ocean will heal his battered psyche, Matt heads out from Corpus Christi Bay in a vintage sloop, trying to out sail bad memories and find a path forward.

As he winds his way east beyond the Gulf, he has adventures (and misadventures), meets a quirky cast of characters, and is dogged at every turn by reminders of the reach of the greedy chicken king, Colonel Clyde Clawson. A close encounter with a coral reef nearly wrecks his boat, a mishap that draws him away from his loosely-charted journey, up the intracoastal waterway, to Bullfrog's Boatyard, and ultimately into the heart of Gullah Geechee country.

Here, Matt meets a beguiling linguistic anthropologist and learns the terrible truth about the Colonel, his secret lab, and his cannibalistic coterie (the Circle of Tantalus). With environmental abuse running rampant, factory farming taking on a whole new meaning, and lab-grown human meat on the menu, it will be up to Matt and friends, both old and new, to bring down the greedy Clawson corporation, find justice for its victims and along the way, save a musical dog, and a whole bunch of chickens.